Sand and Water
by Erinya
Summary: It's something she tells herself every day. But that doesn't make it true. Potentially major spoilers for the end of AWE. Canon pairings.


**Disclaimer**: If they were mine, this would be a happier story.  
**Rating**: PG-13  
**Summary**: It's something she tells herself every day; that doesn't make it true. Set post-AWE; based on rumors, hearsay, and wild speculation, and inspired by two lines from the new teaser trailer. Possible spoilers. Title from the song by Beth Nielsen Chapman.

**Sand and Water**

_It would never have worked between us._

_Just keep telling yourself that, darling._

And she does tell herself that. She tells herself that every morning, when she wakes alone to the cold blue underwater light of dawn and sobs for breath as if she's drowning, because she's fallen fast and hard over the rail of a dream like a dark ship; away from the memory-sound of sails snapping full in the trade wind, of waves against hull, a seabird's cry, his voice. She wonders if one can be haunted by a man who is not dead, because she's sure he's not, and yet sometimes he's there in the corner of her mind's eye, grinning his wicked golden grin. As if he's mocking her, as if he knows what she dreams when she dreams of him: her body, long-unused to touch by day, alive and opening to his hands and mouth and all of him each night, despite her best efforts to exorcise him.

_Just keep telling yourself that, darling._

She tells herself that when she's bent, neck-cricked and stinging eyes, over the mending she takes in to keep from dipping into their savings, the salvaged coins and treasure of dead men that must last six more years out of ten; when she's feeding the gabbling chickens in the yard and milking the cow, dearly bought by scraping and penny-pinching, that keeps young Jamie in butter and cream. When she's elbow-deep in scalding water and dirty laundry, shoulders aching from hauling the buckets from the well, she tells herself that; and she tells herself again when she pours out the basin, watching the muddy rivulets draining away into the dust of the yard like days and weeks and years.

_It would never have worked between us._

She whispers the words as a talisman against the wind off the sea, when it sweeps in through the kitchen windows and sets dust motes to dancing in the slant of afternoon sun, lifting the strands of hair that have worked free from their widow's knot, a gentle touch that nonetheless chafes her to raw, restless pacing. She says it softly to herself when she looks up from the market road to see the silhouette of proud masts and graceful sails on the horizon, and her heart leaps like a doe she once saw shot when she was a little girl in England, one great bound before it staggers, for the sails are always white and not for her. When the women in the village stare and gossip behind their hands in voices loud enough for her to hear--about the poor seamstress and her bastard child, calling her proud, and brazen, and no better than she should be, and a pirate's whore, and many other things--she stares them down and chants it silently like a prayer to keep her thoughts from straying to sharp, cold steel. Her old cutlass is packed away in a sea chest under her bed, with all the other trappings of a life that's past and over. She has no need of it now, nor of the men's clothes, the battered tricorn, the sailor's boots. Hers is a peaceful existence, and she's a mother, not a sailor or a warrior; her Jamie is all she has left of that life and of Will, all the joy and struggle that she needs, all she has chosen and would choose again.

_Just keep telling yourself that, darling._

When it's night at last, the candles burning down unheeded on the mantle, Jamie long ago fallen asleep to his favorite tale of piracy and cursed gold, she sits hunched at the kitchen table with one lax hand curled around a bottle, the other supporting her chin, staring dully at nothing at all. The rum she's swallowed sets her mind spinning like a compass and loosens the weary ache that knots her spine. She lifts the bottle in a toast, but the words taste of ashes in her mouth; the drink gives them the lie. Turning her head from the bitter draught, she catches sight of her own reflection in the window: a grim-faced woman, false roses from the rum on her hollow cheeks, hair straggling down to hide her shadowed eyes. She's only twenty-seven, but she looks far older, faded and used up. She looks away. Her youth has slipped sand-swift through her fingers while she's waited here, staying true to all her promises and someone else's heart.

_It would never have worked between us._

_Just keep telling yourself that, darling._

And she does, oh, she does; but she'll wait the rest of her life to believe it.


End file.
